Description
This volume of 152 pages, with an index at the front, appears to be in a single hand through page 130 and in several other hands through page 152 and on the inside back cover. There is a note on the first leaf that the book was "Ritten by Do[ro]t[h]y Stone," who was perhaps the principal author. On the inside front cover the signature of John Gozna is repeated four times, followed by "of Breg-end in the parish of [thors?]." The same hand appears to have written the index entries for the recipes appearing on pages 131 through 152, as well as a recipe for orange wine on the inside back cover.
The recipes in the principal hand are mostly culinary except for pages 68-73 and 82-3, where a few medical recipes are intermixed. The recipes range broadly but skew to sweet dishes, little cakes and "great" cakes, and fruit wines. There are at least eight different recipes for cheesecakes, including a very early one for "Potatoe Cheesecakes" on page 12. The recipe for Collar of Beef on page 142 notes that the rolled and pickled meat will keep a fortnight.
The principal author uses several uncommon words and phrases, including "sattin bisketts" for hard meringues (page 1); "mugg" meaning a large baking pan (page 5 and elsewhere; the usage is characteristic of "some northern dialects" according to
OED); "knocked" in a mortar rather than the typical "pounded" (page 12 and elsewhere); and "garth" for cake hoop (also used in a contemporaneous manuscript in the
University of Pennsylvania collection). There are also a number of unusual recipes, such as "Shrewsbury cakes" made with buttermilk, page 11; "To hang a goose," page 44 (cured with salt and saltpepter, hung two months in a chimney, and then boiled "with Sprouts as comes out of Cabbidge"); "Sack Pancakes," page 45 (pancakes were often made with sack but rarely as much as here); and an extraordinary recipe titled "To Make a French Palateen" (possibly meaning the modern
ballotine), which occupies pages 106 through 109. This dish entails a boned turkey stuffed with an ox tongue and a calf's foot and then rolled up in a cloth and boiled; four or five boned fowls, stuffed with sweetbreads and pickled oysters and also boiled; and three stewed ducks, the ultimate disposition of which in the finished dish is unclear. The turkey is presented surrounded with the fowls, and the whole is garnished with fritters and forcemeat balls and served with brown and white sauces "in little dishes."
Page 87 of the book is headed "These receipts following are known and approved to be good." It is not clear to which receipts this note refers. The final page (130) of the section in the principal hand contains this memorandum: "Note that those Receipts which have this mark [an "X"] Opposite to them In the Margent are known & Approv'd to be as good as any now Extant." Interestingly, the "Palateen" is not marked with an "X," but many other recipes in the principal section are, as are many of the recipes in the multi-hand section that follows.
